Randy Pausch‘s autographed photo of Captain Kirk, on which William Shatner wrote “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.”

In Star Trek, the Kobayashi Maru is a test that puts you up against a no-win scenario.

In this simulation, a civilian ship named the Kobayashi Maru has been disabled by a gravitic mine and is losing life support. If you don’t intervene, the Kobayashi’s 400 passengers will die.

Unfortunately, the Kobayashi lies in the Klingon Neutral Zone. If you attempt a rescue, you’ll be in violation of the treaty, which will cause the Klingons to take hostile action.

If you try to save the Kobayashi, three Klingon ships move in on you. They refuse to communicate, and they start firing. You’re outnumbered, and the computer is allowed to cheat, so there is no option but to lose.

The point of the test is not to win, but to behave well in the face of certain destruction.

How do you face a situation that you know you can’t win?

There’s a psychological concept known as “learned helplessness.” It refers to when a person or an animal learns that it’s helpless, so it stops trying, even after the situation changes.

In a 1960s experiment that I hope to God would be illegal today, learned helplessness was observed in dogs by subjecting them to electric shocks.

Two dogs were kept in separate rooms, but wired to the same electrical circuit. When the electricity was turned on, the first dog was able to press a lever that would turn it off for both dogs. The second dog didn’t have access to the lever, and from his perspective the shocks just stopped at a random time (since he didn’t know the first dog controlled it).

Although both dogs experienced the exact same electrical shocks, the first dog learned that he had the power to stop them, while the second dog learned that he was helpless. The dog in control quickly recovered, while the helpless dog become chronically depressed. In further experiments, the dogs that had learned helplessness were subjected to shocks that they were free to run away from, but they didn’t try.

But wait, it gets worse. It’s somewhat understandable for the dogs to think that because they couldn’t stop the shocks in the first experiment, they couldn’t stop them in the second. But in another set of experiments, dogs were temporarily paralyzed with a drug before being shocked. Obviously, they couldn’t even try to escape the shocks. By the time they regained their mobility, they had learned they were helpless. They didn’t try to escape the shocks, even though they had never tried before.

Here’s the silver lining: not all dogs acted this way. A third of them, the optimistic ones, did not become helpless. They still tried to escape the shocks and did, despite having failed before.

I’m not sure how the Star Trek cadets were supposed to behave in the Kobayashi Maru simulation, but I guess it was along the lines of staying focused and trying everything possible. And some cadets tried some unexpected solutions, with varying degrees of success.

- On his third attempt, James T. Kirk cheated by reprogramming the simulator to make it possible to rescue the Kobayashi, saying he didn’t believe in the no-win scenario. (In one movie he was awarded a commendation for original thinking, but in another he was put on trial for cheating.)

- Chekov evacuated his ship before crashing it into the three Klingon ships. (However, this meant that the Kobayashi was not saved.)

- Sulu realized it was a trap, and didn’t cross into the Neutral Zone. (Again, this meant the Kobayashi was not saved.)

- Scotty used a bunch of crazy tactics that let him bypass the Klingon shields and beam destructive items to them. While this worked at first, the simulator kept adding more and more Klingon ships, finally beating Scotty with 15 ships. (Because Scotty knew that his techniques would work in the simulator but not the real world, he was judged unsuitable for command track and reassigned to engineering.)

- Piper used a bunch of unorthodox commands that tricked the computer into fighting itself, which ended up crashing the simulator. (Her instructors acknowledged that it might have worked in the real world.)

- Peter David made the bizarre move of destroying the Kobayashi, figuring that (1) a rescue attempt could not succeed, (2) destroying the Kobayashi was more humane than letting the crew be captured and tortured, and (3) the Kobayashi may actually have been a setup planted by the enemy.

- Peter Kirk (James’ nephew) faced a different version of the simulation, in which the enemies were the Romulans instead of the Klingons. He invoked an obscure Romulan law that allowed him to challenge the Romulan commander to a one-on-one fight to the death, during which all ships must cease fire. Before beaming over for the duel, he told his people to beam aboard the Kobayashi survivors and escape, leaving him to die. (The instructor stopped the simulation at this point, but Peter was credited with a nearly perfect outcome, sacrificing himself but saving the Kobayashi and his own ship. The simulator was reprogrammed to prevent this solution from being used again.)

Every now and then, you may face a situation that seems unwinnable. And maybe it is. But don’t give more power to it than you have to. Don’t be too quick to declare it as unwinnable, when there may be a solution you haven’t thought of yet.

And if you really can’t win, doing your best anyway will keep you away from the trap of learned helplessness for the future. Besides, you can always change your definition of “winning.”

Photo by vrogy

In a comment on my post Greatness Without Genies: The Law of Attraction for Realists, Ari Herzog described himself as a realist, but neither an optimist nor a pessimist, saying:

“The optimist-pessimist analogy is best described with the glass of water analogy: one says it’s half full and the other says it’s half empty. To me, the water is water and it doesn’t matter if it’s full or empty so why bother yourself over its measurement?”

I’ve never been thrilled with this classic litmus test for optimism, mainly because our language doesn’t easily allow a neutral possibility. You can’t say “The glass is half” because that’s an incomplete sentence. Half what? You need another word there. And while you could say “That’s half a glass,” it’s more natural to just say it’s half full because that’s how we talk. I don’t think it’s necessarily an indication of optimism though, just the default. But saying “The glass is half empty” does seem like an indication of pessimism.

Furthermore, it depends on the situation. If some idiot drilled holes in your glass as a prank, you might see it as half empty. But if you were left for dead in the Sahara desert and rescued by someone who gave you half a glass of water, you might see it as half full. Your outlook can also change with your mood, and I switch back and forth between half full and half empty all the time.

But anyway, if that’s the analogy we’re going with, is there an option for just plain realism instead of either optimism or pessimism? Does the glass really have to be either half full or half empty? Can’t it simply be half a glass?

When we look at the glass, we take in information with our eyes and process it with our visual cortex and such. We first see it like an android would, and objectively observe that the glass is at half capacity. But then, do you stick with the raw data, or do you subjectively interpret it?

Myers-Briggsically speaking, this is precisely the difference between the two perceiving functions: sensing and intuition. Despite what “sensing” may sound like, it refers to observing the raw data with our five senses. And despite what “intuition” may sound like, it refers to interpreting the raw data to see patterns, connections, and possibilities. Neither function is better than the other, and we all use both, but we all have a preference for one over the other.

So yes, you could have no feeling of optimism or pessimism regarding the glass. The glass is at half capacity. It is what it is, so just let it be. I guess that’s how I feel about Virginia’s annual rainfall of 45.22 inches per year. I have no particular interest in whether that’s high or low, but the figure’s there if I ever need to make a calculation.

On the other hand, you could say that the amount of water in the glass is just a detail, and what really matters is what it means. If you pay for a large slush and the clerk only fills it up halfway, you might see it as half empty, and then decide to, in a most cowardly fashion, shoot the clerk in the back, a la My Cousin Vinny. Or if someone sees that you’re thirsty, and generously decides to give you half their drink, you might see it as half full.

Maybe you don’t care so much about water, but if you got into a bad car accident, I doubt you’d be casually observing that you had half the usual number of arms. You’d probably see yourself as having fewer arms than you should, not more arms than you could.

Half full and half empty are both perfectly realistic assessments, but it’s a matter of perception. In one study, people on opposite sides of an issue were given the same newspaper article to read. The people were asked to read the article carefully and to offer their reaction. On average, people said they thought the article was biased against their own position. That is, people on BOTH sides of the issue thought the SAME article was biased against their side. They chose to see the glass as half empty.

Martin Seligman has talked about the importance of realistic optimism. It combines realistic assessments with an optimistic outlook, avoiding either extreme, and supposedly this gives you better results than either realism or optimism alone.

“According to Seligman, for bad events optimists make external (not their fault), unstable (temporary setback), and specific (a problem only in this context) attributions. Conversely, pessimists interpret bad events in terms of internal (their own fault), stable (will last a long time), and global (will undermine everything they do) attributions.” (source)

You can objectively observe a bad event for what it is, but when it comes to your subjective interpretation, it’s hard to be split right down the middle between optimism and pessimism. You’d have to think that bad events are kind of your fault, kind of stable, and kind of global. And it’s kind of hard to be so wishy washy. So if a particular glass is important to you, decide whether it’s half full or half empty. Hopefully you’ll see it as half full.

Then again, maybe the glass is just too big.